Sino-Russian amphibious tanks and marines storm a beachhead in a 2005 assault drill.

The
PLA aims to beef up its troops' combat readiness and prepare for actual
war situations through exercises this year, according to the latest
annual training directive, amid escalating tensions between China and
Japan over territorial disputes in the East China Sea.

"In 2013, the goal set for the entire army and the People's Armed
Police force is to bolster their capabilities to fight and their ability
to win a war … to be well-prepared for a war by subjecting the army to
hard and rigorous training on an actual combat basis," according to
yesterday's People's Liberation Army Daily, which referred to a training blueprint issued by the PLA's Department of the General Staff for the entire force.

The directive came in stark contrast to that of its predecessor. In
last year's directive, more emphasis was placed on joint military
trainings and co-ordination among different PLA services.

This year's statement stresses the urgency of real combat abilities
in all military training by repeating the phrase "fighting wars", or dazhang, as many as 10 times in the article, which was no more than 1,000 words. The phrase did not appear in last year's directive.

The changes could be a result of the rising tensions in waters
between China and Japan, while they might also indicate that there is a
different focus for the PLA, since the Central Military Commission's
chairman Hu Jintao was succeeded by Xi Jinping , the new PLA
commander-in-chief since November.

Separately, state broadcast media reported in the past week that the
PLA's naval air force kicked off the open-sea training portion of its
annual exercise programme. No details were given on the specific dates
or duration.

The General Staff department's training directive came a day after
Japan's Self-Defence Forces conducted a massive military exercise on
training grounds in Narashino, on the outskirts of Tokyo, on Sunday, in
which 20 aircraft, 300 personnel and 33 vehicles participated.

Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera issued a statement after
the drill insisting that Chinese ships had trespassed in "Japanese
waters" near the Senkaku Islands, which are known in China as the
Diaoyus, and that the security surrounding Japan was therefore being
tightened.

The disputed chain of islands in the East China Sea has been claimed by both China and Japan since the early 1970s.

Andrei Chang, editor-in-chief of the Canada-based Kanwa Defence Review,
said, "The PLA is making its propaganda voice louder this year, aside
from shifting their target to Japan instead of the Philippines last
year," adding the statement was more or less the same as last year's.

The siege of Leningrad is still considered the most lethal siege in
world history, a shocking “racially motivated starvation policy”,
described as: “an integral part of Nazi policy in the Soviet Union
during World War 11.”

The
872 day siege began on 8th September 1941 and was finally broken on
27th January 1944. It is described as: “one of the longest and most
destructive sieges in history and overwhelmingly the most costly in
casualties.” Some historians cite it as a genocide. Due to record
keeping complexities the exact number of deaths resultant from the
blockade’s deprivations are uncertain, figures range from 632,000 to 1.5
million.

Sieges now extend to entire countries, they have become the torture
before the destruction. And they are not counted in long days, but in
long years. Iran thirty three years, Iraq thirteen-plus years.
Ironically the disparity in the deaths in Iraq resultant from that
siege, mirror near exactly what was considered a “genocide” in
Leningrad.

Syria has been subject to EU “restrictions” since 2011, ever more
strangulating, with near every kind of financial transaction made
impossible by May 2011- when “restrictions” were also placed on
President Assad himself, all senior government officials, senior
security and armed forces Heads. The list of that denied is dizzying
(i.) By February 2012, assets of individuals were frozen, as those of
the Central Bank of Syria.

Cargo flights by Syrian carriers to the EU were also barred, as was
trade in gold, precious metals and diamonds – anything which might
translate in to hard cash, without which neither individuals or
countries can purchase the most basic essentials.
By July 2012 Syrian Arab Airlines and even Syria’s Cotton Marketing Organisation had joined the EU’s victims.

America of course, had been way ahead of the game, with the Syria
Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act (ii) signed in to law on
12th December 2003, the year of Iraq’s comprehensive US-led destruction.
Thus the mighty USA’s personal siege on under twenty one million
people, is now entering its tenth year.

By last August, as with Iraq before it, the inability to trade meant
that, as ever, the now Nobel Peace Prize winning EU and the policies of
the Nobel Peace Prize winning US President, were targeting Syria’s most
vulnerable.

“While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place—at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation’s news media have described.”
Anderson Cooper jumps on this portion of the sentence:

“While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place—"
before the following qualifying prep:

"at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation’s news media have described.”

This is intended to milk a reaction of outrage from his audience.

Mr. Cooper doesn't quite know who he's messing with. Personally, I
would not want to go toe-to-toe with Professor James Tracy. I've read
his past work and he is one of the sharper knives in the drawer.
Anderson had to use a deceptive excerpt out of context in order for
people to buy his fake righteous indignation.

Believe it or not, there are actually people out there who are
convinced that last month's horrific shooting in Newtown, Connecticut
was staged. Anderson Cooper opened his show tonight taking on these conspiracy theorists.
He said that ordinarily, he wouldn't give much thought to insane
conspiracies, but one of the people pushing them is a Florida professor
who raises doubts as to whether the shooting "ever took place" in the
way that the media described, and the whole thing was just a huge
conspiracy to get the country behind gun control. And as if that wasn't
unbelievable enough, he also suspects that some of the parents of the
children were really actors. – Mediaite.com

Free-Market Analysis: A recent CNN/Anderson
Cooper "Keeping Them Honest" segment focused on a media professor,
James Tracy, who has publicly claimed that the Sandy Hook shootings "may
not have happened at all, at least ... the way they have been
described."
An article by the Sun Sentinel describes the Tracy controversy as follows:

FAU prof stirs controversy by disputing Newtown massacre ... A
communication professor known for conspiracy theories has stirred
controversy at Florida Atlantic University with claims that last month's
Newtown, Conn., school shootings did not happen as reported — or may
not have happened at all.

Moreover, James Tracy asserts in radio interviews and on his
memoryholeblog.com, that trained "crisis actors" may have been employed
by the Obama administration in an effort to shape public opinion in favor of the event's true purpose: gun control.

... In one of his blog posts, "The Sandy Hook School Massacre:
Unanswered Questions and Missing Information," Tracy cites several
sources for his skepticism, including lack of surveillance video or
still images from the scene, the halting performance of the medical
examiner at a news conference, timeline confusion, and how the accused
shooter was able to fire so many shots in just minutes ...

Tracy said also has doubts about the official version of the
Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9-11 terror
attacks and the Aurora, Colo., theater murders."I describe myself as a scholar and public intellectual," he
said, "interested in going more deeply into controversial public events.
Although some may see [my theories] as beyond the pale, I am doing what
we should be doing as academics."

Cooper is at his silky best in this segment, blasting away at the
professor's theories and even implying that he ought to be fired for
voicing such an opinion.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

In early March of 2009, The Department of Homeland Security, held it’s annual National Fusion Center Conference [1].
The conference highlighted the necessity for Fusion Centers to achieve
Baseline Capabilities in the sharing of information and intelligence
with the federal government and each other.

At the end of the same month the DHS gave a press release [2] to announce their selection of Purdue, and Rutgers Universities to co-lead the newest Center of Excellence (COE).

Centers of Excellence were created through the
Homeland Security Act of 2002; the first centers began operation in
2004. With the addition of the newest one above, there are a total of 12
Centers across the country. The total number of these centers is
skewed; as each center is in collaboration with multiple universities;
as well as being partners with local, state, federal, and international
entities. These COE’s also work with national laboratories, and
corporate partners such as the RAND corporation to offer viable real
world applications. In the end, there aren’t 12 centers, but a web of
several hundred, and possibly thousands of centers.

Notice, their admitted overall goal is not only to ‘disseminate
knowledge’ and technical advances for the homeland security ‘mission’,
but also to create a Homeland Security Culture within the educational system; [5], 6].

Each COE website[3] has an education link; not all sites have their
educational portion up for viewing. The ones who do have the educational
curricula visible, show programs offered for K-12 and college
curricula, into graduate school education. From Purdue University’s COE website [7],

“This program is designed to support undergraduate and
graduate students in developing the skills to become preeminent
scientists in the homeland security specific and technical community.”

The Orwellian Office of University Programs, is not only creating “Obama’s Youth”, but also creating “scientists” who are studied in Department of Homeland Security disciplines!

Amongst other activities, they do as the name suggests; they create
studies. Hidden amongst the Islamic Jihad studies[9] were the reports of
the real terrorists; you, and I!

Two reports stuck out more than the rest. The first was a study
conducted from 2007 to 2008, and finished with the creation of the U.S.
Extremist Criminal Terror database[10]. The study, and now database
focus on far-right extremists; the data base of U.S. Extremist Crime,
comprises 1990 to 2005.

The other study of interest was,“Homegrown Radicalization and the Role of Social Networks and Social Inclusiveness in the United States”[11].
There is no finished report of this study. The last update was, July
31, 2008. It seems this study is the one requested through The Homegrown
Terrorism Prevention Act (H.R. 1955/S. 1959)[12] “The act would
establish a national commission and a university-based “Center for
Excellence” to study and propose legislation to prevent the threat of
“radicalization” of Americans.” Interestingly enough, just a few months
after the final START study update on July 31, 2008, the DHS released,
The “Domestic Extremism Lexicon”[13]. This Lexicon was a “newly
unclassified Department of Homeland Security report warns against the
possibility of violence by unnamed “right-wing extremists” concerned
about illegal immigration, increasing federal power, restrictions on
firearms, abortion and the loss of U.S. sovereignty and singles out
returning war veterans as particular threats.”[14] All this came from
the START Center of Excellence!

Friday, January 11, 2013

Americans die younger and have more illnesses and accidents on
average than people in other high-income countries—even wealthier,
insured, college-educated Americans, a report said Wednesday.

The study by the federally sponsored National Research Council and
Institute of Medicine found the U.S. near the bottom of 17 affluent
countries for life expectancy, with high rates of obesity and diabetes,
heart disease, chronic lung disease and arthritis, as well as infant
mortality, injuries, homicides, teen pregnancy, drug deaths and sexually
transmitted diseases.

"The [U.S.] health disadvantage is pervasive—it affects all age
groups up to age 75 and is observed for multiple diseases, biological
and behavioral risk factors, and injuries," said the report's authors,
who are public-health and medicine academics recruited by the government
panels.

The shorter life expectancy for Americans largely was attributed to
high mortality for men under age 50, from car crashes, accidents and
violence. But the report also said U.S. women's gains in life expectancy
had been lagging behind other well-off countries.

The authors offered a range of possible explanations for Americans'
worse health and mortality, including social inequality. They also
described criticisms including limited availability of contraception for
teenagers, community designs that discourage physical activity such as
walking, air pollution and access to firearms, as well as individual
behaviors such as high calorie consumption.
The U.S. health-care system wasn't spared criticism, with authors
describing it as fragmented, lacking sufficient primary-care physicians
and posing financial barriers to millions of Americans who lack
insurance or are unable to afford out-of-pocket medical costs.

But the chairman of the panel of authors, Steven Woolf, a professor
of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the report
showed that health outcomes were determined "by much more than health
care."

"Our health as Americans is only partly aided by having a very good
health-care system," he said. "Much of our health disadvantage comes
from factors outside of the clinical system and outside of what doctors
and hospitals can do."

The Obama administration has aimed to improve Americans' health by
expanding insurance coverage through the 2010 Affordable Care Act, while
Republicans have pushed for giving the private sector a greater role in
managing health care through changes to such programs as Medicare.

Public health has received relatively little attention from
lawmakers, despite campaigns by high-profile figures such as first lady
Michelle Obama on childhood obesity and New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg on smoking, gun control and the sale of high-calorie
beverages.

"The political environment on health is so wrapped up right now
around implementation of health reform that we need to have the space to
have this larger conversation and for people to understand that having
health insurance is necessary but not sufficient to close this gap,"
said Jeff Levi, head of the Trust for America's Health, a public health
advocacy group. He wasn't involved in the study.

The new report noted that average life expectancy for American men,
at 75.6 years, was the lowest among the 17 countries and almost four
years shorter than for Switzerland, the best-performing nation.

American women's average life expectancy, 80.8 years, was
second-lowest among the countries and five years shorter than Japan's,
which had the highest expectancy.
The report's authors were particularly critical of the availability
of guns, writing: "One behavior that probably explains the excess
lethality of violence and unintentional injuries in the United States is
the widespread possession of firearms and the common practice of
storing them [often unlocked] at home."

The authors noted that Americans who lived past age 75 had higher
survival rates compared with similar countries, and Americans overall
had better rates of surviving cancer and strokes. They also said the
U.S. better controls high blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking rates and
use of alcohol than many other nations.

The report didn't directly consider U.S. health in the context of
spending on care, but noted that America's low outcomes were striking
given that U.S. per capita health spending exceeds that of other
countries.

Editor's Note: Here's a good rule of thumb. If the official story contradicts existing evidence and there is no transparency while independent inquiry is discouraged by the authorities, it is reasonable to acknowledge that the event was facilitated by the authorities.

A federal judge has rejected an attempt by the Obama administration to
use secret evidence to derail a former Stanford student's attempt to
challenge her inclusion on the government's no-fly list, Bob Egelko of The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

In 2005 officials detained Rahinah Ibrahim when she
attempted to fly from San Francisco International Airport to her native
Malaysia. The then-Standford doctoral student and her 14-year-old
daughter were allowed to take a flight the next day but were not allowed
to return to the U.S. two months later.

The U.S. Consulate later informed her that her student visa had been revoked under a terrorism law, according to Egelko.

In 2009 Ibrahim settled claims against police and others
involved in her arrest for $225,000, but brought a new suit because her
inclusion on the no-fly list has barred her and her daughter from
returning to the U.S. for nearly eight years. (Ibrahim has four children.)

The government argues that it cannot discuss its no-fly list
because it would "reveal or tend to reveal information that is
classified."

Consequently the Justice Department called District Judge William
Alsup and said an agent would bring him evidence for dismissal of the
suit but would take it back because Ibrahim's counsel couldn't be "trusted to handle sensitive information."

The £200 million-a-year official weather forecaster often gets it wrong

This week it has admitted there is no evidence that ‘global warming’ is happening

The Met Office quietly readjusted its temperature projections on its website on Christmas Eve

Daily Mail
James DelingpoleWas there ever a government quango quite so useless as the Met Office?

From
its infamous ‘barbecue summer’ washout of 2009 to the snowbound winter
it failed to predict in 2010 and the recent forecast-defying floods, our
£200 million-a-year official weather forecaster has become a national
joke.

But of all its recent embarrassments, none come close to matching the Met Office’s latest one. Without
fanfare — apparently in the desperate hope no one would notice — it has
finally conceded what other scientists have known for ages: there is no
evidence that ‘global warming’ is happening.

A chunk of ice is shown drifting after it
separated from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf
off the north coast of Ellesmere
Island in Canada. The Met Office has conceded
there is no evidence that
'global warming' is happening

The Met Office quietly readjusted its temperature projections on its website on Christmas Eve. Until
then, it had been confidently predicting temperature rises of at least
0.2 degrees per decade, with a succession of years exceeding even the
record-breaking high of 1998.

Its
latest chart, however, confirmed in a press release earlier this week,
tells a very different story: no more global warming is expected till at
least 2017. According
to Dr David Whitehouse of the independent think-tank the Global Warming
Policy Foundation, the climbdown couldn’t be more dramatic or more
devastating for the Met Office’s credibility. ‘They’re
panicking. All the predictions they’ve been making about man-made
global warming these past 20 years have started to come crashing about
their ears.’

For two
decades the Met Office has acted as Britain’s foremost cheerleader for
climate change alarmism. In 2007, its Hadley Centre for climate change
research produced a briefing document for the Government claiming its
state-of-the-art computer models left no doubt: man-made global warming
was a very real threat which needed to be addressed urgently by
policy-makers.

‘The Met
Office Hadley Centre has the highest concentration of outstanding people
who do outstanding work, spanning the breadth of modelling,
attribution, and date analysis, of anywhere in the world,’ claimed an
expert from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in the
document.

Many in the Government were impressed for, a year later, the 2008 Climate Change Act was passed by an overwhelming majority. The
act has been described by veteran journalist Christopher Booker as the
most expensive legislation in history, committing the government to as
much as £734 billion (£18.3 billion a year for the next 40 years) in
extra spending to ‘decarbonise’ the economy. It is also one of the reasons why our countryside is being ruined by ugly, noisy wind turbines.

But what if carbon dioxide isn’t the culprit for global temperature changes? What
if all the expensive, economy-ravaging, job-killing, environmentally
destructive measures we’ve taken have been a spectacular waste of money?

If so, the Met Office will be attacked for being not just risibly
incompetent — but an active menace both to the integrity of science and
to the nation’s wellbeing.Hence its defiant attempts to argue that nothing has changed and it’s business as usual.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

The Venezuelan Minister of Correctional Services,
Iris Varela, has announced on her Twitter account the expulsion of a
French citizen known as Frédéric Laurent Bouquet, December 29, 2012

Mr. Bouquet (photo) had been arrested in Caracas on June 18, 2009,
with three Dominican nationals in possession of an arsenal. In the
apartment he had acquired, forensic police seized 500 grams of C4
explosives, 14 assault rifles including 5 with telescopic lenses, 5 with
laser sighting and one with a silencer, special cables, 11 electronic
detonators, 19,721 cartridges of different calibers, 3 machine guns, 4
hand guns of different calibers, 11 radios, 3 walkie talkies and a radio
base, five 12-gauge shotguns, 2 bulletproof vests, 7 military uniforms,
8 grenades, one gas mask, one combat knife and 9 bottles of gunpowder.

During his trial, Mr. Bouquet admitted he had been trained in Israel
and was an agent of French military intelligence service (DGSE). He
admitted planning an attack to assassinate Constitutional President Hugo
Chavez.

Mr. Bouquet had been sentenced to four years in prison for "illegal possession of weapons."
He served his sentence. He was taken from his cell by Ordinance No.
096-12 of trial judge Yulismar Jaime, then was expelled for "undermining national security" under Article 39 paragraph 4 of the Migration and Foreigners Act.

Venezuelan authorities had so far refrained from communicating on
this subject. The facts were confirmed by the spokesman of the Quai
d’Orsay, Philippe Lalliot. The French Embassy in Caracas declined to
comment.

From our investigation we can conclude that:

(1) President Nicolas Sarkozy had ordered the assassination of his counterpart Hugo Chavez;

(2) the operation was a fiasco;

(3) France granted substantial compensation to stifle this matter during Mr Sarkozy’s term in office.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

As a writer I have found that one problem in communicating
with readers is that many have political, social, economic, or
ideological agendas.

They read in order to confirm their beliefs and agendas. Neither
the right-wing nor the left-wing can escape their ideological boxes and
are creatures of their biases. They want their prejudices vindicated and
their beliefs supported.

A writer who tells them something that they do not want to hear receives abuse.

These readers cannot benefit from facts and new information and
change their minds. Truth is what validates their prejudices, biases, or
their programing. Objective truth is not the matrix in which they live.

If a writer makes a case so clear that readers simply cannot avoid
it, the reader will intentionally misread the article or book and attack
the writer for saying everything that he does not say. The chorus will
join in the effort to shut down the unwelcome information before it
reaches others.

The Israel Lobby uses the technique of branding everyone who
criticizes, no matter how constructively and moderately, any Israeli
government policy, no matter how egregious, an anti-semite. The Israeli
government applies this tactic to its own Israeli political opposition
and to Jews themselves who are branded “self-hating Jews” if they
criticize government policy toward the Palestinians. The effect is to
deprive the Israeli government of constructive criticism. Only the
Israel Lobby could call former President Jimmy Carter an anti-semite.
Anyone who is not totally enthusiastic about Israel’s theft of
Palestinian lives and properties is an enemy of Israel. These wild
accusations from the Israel Lobby deprive anti-semite of any meaning.
Essentially, every moral person has become an anti-semite. The Israeli
government has simply cut itself off from truth.

The identical hardline substitution of self-interest for factual
reality characterizes the American right and left. The right-wing
insists that America is going broke because of welfare spending. The
left-wing persists in its belief that government is capable of great
good if only the right people are in power and that social institutions,
such as religion, and inanimate objects, such as guns, are responsible
for human evil.

If a majority of Americans sought objective truth instead of
confirmation of their beliefs, truth could prevail over special
interests. Reality would inform social, political, and economic life,
and American prospects would be good. But when a majority are hostile to
facts and truths that do not support their biases and serve their
interests, there is a disconnect from reality, which is the situation in
America today.

It is ironic that the left-wing, which has a large repertoire of
tales of societies in the clutches of shamans, witch doctors and
priests, imposes its own artificial or make-believe realities on social,
political, and economic explanations. Leftists who appear to be
oblivious to the militarized murderous police state erected by Bush and
Obama still go out of their way to tell me how evil Ronald Reagan was
and that I must also be evil because I served in the Reagan
administration.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Editor’s note: An update from the author has been added to this article on September 20, 2012.

Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded
on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year).
Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract
some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data.

National Public Radio (NPR) published an article
on its website last month claiming, “Ten years ago, a piece of ice the
size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off
Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula
had suffered similar fates a few years before. The events became poster
children for the effects of global warming. … There’s no question that
unusually warm air triggered the final demise of these huge chunks of
ice.”

NPR failed to mention anywhere in its article that Antarctic sea ice has been growing since satellites first began measuring the ice 33 years ago and the sea ice has been above the 33-year average throughout 2012.

Indeed, none of the mainstream media are covering this important story. A Google
News search of the terms Antarctic, sea ice and record turns up not a
single article on the Antarctic sea ice record. Amusingly, page after
page of Google News results for Antarctic sea ice record show links to
news articles breathlessly spreading fear and warning of calamity
because Arctic sea ice recently set a 33-year low.

Sea ice around one pole is shrinking while sea ice around another
pole is growing. This sure sounds like a global warming crisis to me.

Update: To provide more perspective on global warming and
Antarctica, I would like to update this column with some additional
information:

As meteorologist Anthony Watts explains,
new data show ice mass is accumulating on the Antarctic continent as
well as in the ocean surrounding Antarctica. The new data contradict an
assertion by global warming alarmists that the expanding Antarctic sea
ice is coming at the expense of a decline in Antarctic continental ice.

The new data also add context to sensationalist media stories about
declining ice in small portions of Antarctica, such as portions of West
Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula (see here,
for example). The mainstream media frequently publish stories focusing
on ice loss in these two areas, yet the media stories rarely if ever
mention that ice is accumulating over the larger area of East Antarctica
and that the continent as a whole is gaining snow and ice mass.

Interestingly, a new NASA study finds Antarctica once supported vegetation similar to that of present-day Iceland.

“The southward movements of rain bands associated with a warmer
climate in the high-latitude southern hemisphere made the margins of
Antarctica less like a polar desert, and more like present-day Iceland,”
a co-author of the NASA study reports.

With policymakers and political leaders increasingly
unable to combat global climate change, more scientists are considering
the use of manual manipulation of the environment to slow warming’s
damage to the planet.

But a University of Iowa law professor believes the legal
ramifications of this kind of geo-engineering need to be thought through
in advance and a global governance structure put in place soon to
oversee these efforts. “Geo-engineering is a global concern that will
have climate and weather impacts in all countries, and it is virtually
inevitable that some group of people will be harmed in the process,”
says Jon Carlson, professor of law at the UI College of Law.
“The international community must act now to take charge of this
activity to ensure that it is studied and deployed with full attention
to the rights and interests of everyone on the planet.”

Carlson
is an expert in environmental law and international law who believes
geo-engineering is inevitable and will likely happen sooner than later.
He considers the issue in a new paper, “Reining in Phaethon’s Chariot:
Principles for the Governance of Geoengineering,” published in the
current issue of the journal Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems.
His co-author, Adam D.K. Abelkop, is a UI law graduate now in the
doctoral program at the Indiana University School of Public Health and
Environmental Affairs.

Carlson says the concept of geo-engineering goes back to at least the
19th century, when scientists proposed seeding clouds to increase
rainfall. Today, scientists have a long list of geo-engineering ideas
that could be used to slow the impact of global warming while other
methods are developed to actually mitigate the damage. Some ideas are
simple and locally focused, such as planting new forests to absorb
carbon dioxide, or painting roofs and paved areas white to reduce solar
heat absorption.

Others are more complex and controversial—manually cooling oceans so
carbon dioxide-laden water sinks to the bottom more quickly; building
space-based shields and mirrors to deflect solar heat from the planet;
or injecting chemicals like hydrogen sulfide or sulfur dioxide into the
upper atmosphere, creating an aerosol shield that reduces the amount of
solar heat reaching the earth’s surface.

But Carlson says geo-engineering comes with obvious international
legal implications because no one country can implement its own
geo-engineering plan without causing weather or climate changes in other
countries. There’s also the law of unintended consequences, because
while many geo-engineering concepts have proved hopeful in the lab,
nobody knows what will happen when actually put into practice. For
instance, Carlson says that while manually cooling the ocean may be seen
as a generally good idea, what impact will that have on farmers in
India whose crops depend on rain from heat-induced tropical monsoons?

To address these issues, Carlson urges the creation of an
international governing body separate from any existing organization
that approves or rejects geo-engineering plans, taking into
consideration the best interests of people and countries around the
world. He says any legal regimen involving geo-engineering activities
should require they be publicly announced in the planning stage, and all
countries are notified so they have a voice in deliberations.

As a model for his oversight body, Carlson suggests the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). Like the IMF, his proposed organization would give
all countries a place during discussions, but decisions would be made
by a relatively small group of directors, each of which has a weighted
vote that’s based on their country’s greenhouse gas production. That is,
countries that produce more greenhouse gases will spend more money to
combat global climate change, and so will have more votes.
Carlson’s proposed body would oversee a compensation fund to help
people and countries that are harmed by other country’s approved
geo-engineering activities, or by unseen effects of those activities.

Karsten Brandt was born in Bonn, Germany in 1973 and currently holds a doctorate in the field of Climatology

After graduating from the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Gymnasium in Bonn (1992), Brandt founded www.donnerwetter.de
and is one of the first private weather service sites in Germany.
After studying business administration at the University of Hagen
(Diploma in Business Administration, 2001) as well as the history,
politics and economics (Master’s degree, 2004) In 2007 Brandt earned a
PhD in Climatology at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In his
writings, Brandt challenges Global Warming as a failed climate policy.
He argues that solar activity, ocean currents and other features play a
far greater role in changing the climate compared to CO2.

In
addition to his scientific publications on climate science, Brandt has
written travel and historical articles on the subject of weather and the
regional history of the Seven Mountains.

______________________________________

Johannes Remmel
is Minister for Climate Protection, Environment, Agriculture,
Conservation and Consumer Affairs of North Rhine-Westphalia. He is also
parliamentary manager of the Green Party of the North Rhine-Westphalia
state parliament in which he has been a member since June 1995. As a
member of the Green Party in the state parliament, Mr. Remmel has served
as the party’s tourism and financial affairs spokesperson, and has
served as the party’s environmental spokesperson since 1997.

The followng is a translation of the spoken word from German to English from the 2007 TV News Video Below:

News Anchor
: “Suddenly the radar registers the presence of a cloud, but it’s not
clear, how this happened? The answer seems to be that this was the
result of a military experiment. What are these mysterious trails and
what is their purpose? We will try to find out…

Narrator:
The military planes of the German Federal army are manipulating our
climate. This is what the weather researchers are presuming and their
suspicions are confirmed. Sinister clouds up to 350 km in length appear
all of a sudden on the radar, but only on the meteorological radar. The
first time it happened was the Summer of 2005 and then in March, 2006.
The German Army has admitted having war exercises towards the borders
with the Netherlands.

For Meteorologist, Karsten Brandt this is the answer to the enigma:

”
The Federal army is manipulating the meteorological maps. We can say
with 97% certainty that we have on our hands “chemical trails” comprised
of fine dust containing polymers and metals
used to disrupt radar signals. This is their main purpose but I was
surprised that this artificial cloud was so wide-spread. The radar
images are stunning considering the needed tons of dispersed elements,
although the Army claims that only small amounts of material were
propagated. The military heads claim that the substances used are not
harmful . “

Narrator: The records report the emissions of chemical trails are observed at low altitudes.In
the United States of America there are protest after protest for many
years now, against these military operations and now people are
mobilizing in Germany as well. For example Johannes Remmel of the Greens:

Remmel:
“It’s obvious that enormous regions are being polluted with clandestine
actions, but all of this has to be made public. The government must
provide explanations to the unsuspecting population.”

Brandt: “From
our observations we can conclude that they fly over the regions of
Westfalia, Bielefeld, the Ruhr zone to Saxony and Hamburg forming a
really dense layer of artificial cloud-cover.”

Narrator:
After the first discovery Karsten Brandt filed a legal challenge
against responsible parties involved in secret weather manipulation
based on his careful verifications and data gathered by radar through
which he documented every anomalous cloud formation.

Everywhere I look outside my home I see people busy on their high
tech devices, while driving, while walking, while shopping, while in
groups of friends, while in restaurants, while waiting in doctor offices
and hospitals, while sitting in toilets – everywhere. While connected
electronically, they are inattentive to and disconnected from physical
reality.

People have been steadily manipulated to become technology addicted. Technology is the opiate of the masses.

This results is technology servitude. I am
referring to a loss of personal freedom and independence because of
uncontrolled consumption of many kinds of devices that eat up time and
money. Most people do not use independent, critical thinking to
question whether their quality of life is actually improved by the
incessant use of technology products that are marketed more aggressively
than just about anything else.

I for one have worked successfully to greatly limit my use of
technological innovations, to keep myself as unconnected as possible and
to maximize my privacy and independence. I do not have a smart phone; I
do not participate in social networking; I do not have any Apple
product, nothing like an IPod, IPad and similar devices. I have never
used Twitter or anything similar, or sent a text message. I do use the
Internet judiciously on an old laptop. Email is good and more than
enough for me. I very rarely use an old cell phone.

So what have I gained? Time, privacy and no obsession to constantly
be in touch, connected, available, informed about others. Call me old
fashioned, but I feel a lot more in control of my life than most people
that I see conspicuously using their many modern devices. They have
lost freedom and do not seem to care about that. When I take my daily
long walks I have no device turned on, no desire to communicate, nor to
listen to music; I want to be in the moment, only sensing the world
around me, unfiltered and uninterrupted by any technology.

I am not hooked by advancing technology, not tethered to constantly
improved devices, not curious about the next generation of highly priced
but really unnecessary products, not logged on and online all the
time. I have no apps or games.

Those who think interactions with people through technology devices
are the real thing have lost their sanity. Technology limits and
distorts human, social interactions. Worse yet, people have lost
ability and talent for actually conversing to people face to face,
responding to nonverbal nuances, or through intimate writing with more
than just a few words.

Consider these findings:
“Researchers from the University of Glasgow found that half of the
study participants reported checking their email once an hour, while
some individuals check up to 30 to 40 times an hour. An AOL study
revealed that 59 percent of PDA users check every single time an email
arrives and 83 percent check email every day on vacation.”

A 2010 survey found that 61 percent of Americans (even higher among young people) say they are addicted to the Internet. Another survey reported that “addicted” was the word most commonly used by people to describe their relationship to technology. One study found that people had a harder time resisting the allure of social media than they did for sex, sleep, cigarettes, and alcohol.

A recent study
by the Pew Research Center ’s Internet and American Life Project found
that 44 percent of cellphone owners had slept with their phone next to
their bed. Worse, 67 percent had experienced “phantom rings,” checking
their phone even when it was not ringing or vibrating. A little good
news: the proportion of cellphone owners who said they “could live
without it” increased to 37 percent from 29 percent in 2006.

The main goal of technology companies is to get you to spend more
money and time on their products, not to actually improve your quality
of life. They have successfully created a cultural disease that has
gone viral. Consumers willingly surrender their freedom, money and time
in pursuit of what exactly? To keep pace with their peers? To appear
modern and sophisticated? To not miss out on the latest information?
To stay plugged in? I do not get it.

I see people as trapped in a pathological relationship with
time-sucking technology, where they serve technology more than
technology serves them. I call this technology servitude. Richard
Fernandez, an executive coach at Google acknowledged
that “we can be swept away by our technologies.” Welcome to virtual
living. To break the grand digital delusion people must consider how
lives long ago could be terrific without all the technology regalia
pushed today.

What is a healthy use of technology devices? That is the crucial
question. Who is really in charge of my life? That is what people need
to ask themselves if they are to have any chance of breaking up
delusions about their use of technology. When they can live happily
without using so much technology for a day or a week, then they can
regain control and personal freedom and become the master of
technology. Discover what there is to enjoy in life that is free of
technology. Mae West is famous for proclaiming the wisdom that “too
much of a good thing is wonderful.” Time to discover that it does not
work for technology.

As to globalization of technology servitude: Is this worldwide
progress what is best for humanity? Is downloaded global dehumanization
being sucked up? Time for global digital dieting. Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com.

A federal district court judge in California last week denied a
motion by Obama administration lawyers to dismiss a legal challenge to
the “no-fly” list brought by a young Malaysian woman, Rahinah Ibrahim.

Ibrahim, at the time a Stanford University Ph.D. candidate, was
detained at San Francisco International Airport on January 2, 2005 when
she and her daughter attempted to board a flight to her home country.
She was intending to fly home to present her doctoral research at a
conference sponsored by Stanford. Ibrahim was subjected to harsh
treatment by airport security officials. Although she was in a
wheelchair due to complications from a recent hysterectomy operation,
officials handcuffed her and held her in a jail cell for two hours.

Officials eventually allowed Ibrahim to depart from the United
States, but refused to allow her to re-enter the country. The government
revoked her visa and denied her application for another visa in 2009,
citing possible terrorist activity. No evidence has ever been presented
by the government to support allegations of links to terrorist
organizations.

Ibrahim originally filed the suit in 2006. It will now proceed to
discovery, during which court proceedings may force the Obama
administration to relinquish state records pertaining to Ibrahim’s case.
Ibrahim is seeking to return to the United States and be removed from
the “no-fly” list.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has heard the
Ibrahim case on two previous occasions. Both times, as in the present
case in US District Court, the Obama administration refused to release
any evidence regarding Ibrahim’s alleged terrorist connections, claiming
that such information involved sensitive security matters that neither
the public, nor even the courts, were privileged to view.

The administration maintains that it has the right to block
individuals from flying on commercial flights or entering the country
without presenting any evidence either to the targeted person or a court
of law.

US District Court Judge William Alsup issued the order denying the
Justice Department’s motion to dismiss. In it, he lambasted the
administration for the anti-democratic maneuvers it has used in its
repeated attempts to quash the case.

“Here the government seeks to affirmatively use allegedly privileged
information to dispose of the case entirely without ever revealing to
the other side what its secret evidence might be,” wrote Alsup. “Here,
the government has not justified its sweeping proposal. It has gone so
far as even to redact from its table of authorities some of the reported
case law on which it relies! This is too hard to swallow.

“The government’s latest motion based on lack of standing, being a complete mystery, is denied.”
The Obama administration’s attempt to keep Ibrahim in a legal limbo
is part of its wider policy of continuing and expanding the domestic
surveillance network and police state infrastructure established by the
Bush administration.

The “no-fly” list, created in 2001 ostensibly in reaction to the
September 11 attacks, today reportedly includes over 20,000 names. This
is more than double the number in 2011. The Obama administration has
placed more names on the “no-fly” list in the last 12 months than George
W. Bush did during his eight years in office.

The “no-fly” list is merely one of many such lists compiled by the US
government’s Terrorist Screening Center. The enormity of the
government’s surveillance network is exemplified by the larger
“terrorist watch list,” which includes the names of about 400,000
people.

There is no public oversight of the process by which the government
determines whom to place on the “no-fly” or “terrorist watch” lists.
Individual students, professors and workers have likely been placed on
the list on account of their opposition to US foreign policy as
expressed in phone, email, or social media communications. An unknown
number of innocent individuals have been placed on the list merely
because of their race, nationality or religion. Since the government is
not required to make public the reasons for an individual’s placement on
the list, or even inform an individual that he or she has been put on
the list, there is no way to hold the government accountable.

Ibrahim, who was allowed to complete her Ph.D. in absentia, is still unable to return to the United States.

The Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says no law empowers any judge to stop it from conducting illegal scientific experiments on seniors, children and the sick.

That
astounding assertion will be tested Friday, when a federal district
court in Alexandria decides whether it has jurisdiction to hear claims
made by the American Tradition Institute that EPA researchers are exposing unwary and genetically susceptible senior citizens to air pollutants the agency says can cause a variety of serious cardiac and respiratory problems, including sudden death.

Although the lawsuit only addresses ongoing, purportedly illegal experimentation being carried out at an EPA laboratory on the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, EPA
researchers and grantees have carried out dozens of similarly shocking
experiments over the past 10 years at UNC and other schools, including
Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, University of Rochester, University of Southern California and University of Washington.

During that time at those university laboratories, EPA-employed
or -funded researchers have intentionally exposed a variety of people
to concentrated levels of different air pollutants, including
particulate matter (soot and dust), diesel exhaust, ozone and chlorine
gas — the latter substance more recognized as a World War I-era chemical
weapon than as an outdoor air pollutant.

Over the same period that the experiments in question have been conducted, the EPA has become more and more alarmist in communications to Congress and the public about danger the air pollutants pose to individuals even at commonplace, non-concentrated levels. The EPA has determined, for example, that any exposure to fine particulate matter can cause death within hours or days of inhalation. EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, moreover, has testified in Congress that particulate matter causes about 1 of every 4 deaths in America.

Not
only is diesel exhaust largely made up of “deadly” particulate matter,
but its components include polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs),
which the EPA considers to be cancer-causing. The agency generally says that any exposure to a carcinogen increases the risk of cancer. Diesel exhaust also includes lead. The EPA
has determined that lead can be readily absorbed from inhalation into
the blood and that there is no safe level of lead in blood.

The EPA has exposed its human guinea pigs to ozone levels as high as 400 parts per billion (ppb), more than five times higher than the EPA’s current standard and six times higher than the standard expected to be adopted in 2013. In a March 2012 letter to Mrs. Jackson from the agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council,
a council member unwittingly commented that “[experimental] exposure of
rats to 300 or 400 ppb may be very relevant to humans, but impossible
to study in humans for ethical reasons.” Little did the council member
know that EPA researchers routinely — but illegally — do the “impossible.”

Aside from the EPA-determined
dangers associated with the air pollutants used in the experiments,
there are the human study subjects. While some have been healthy young
adults, others have been elderly, asthmatic or both. Many have been
diagnosed with “metabolic syndrome.” Some had suffered heart attacks
and, while they were in rehabilitation, were enrolled as human guinea
pigs. EPA-funded researchers apparently have even exposed children to dangerous diesel exhaust and ultrafine particles.
The American Tradition Institute contends in its lawsuit that the EPA
has broken virtually every rule established to protect human subjects
used in scientific experiments, including the Nuremberg Code, ethics
principles for human experimentation adopted following the Nuremberg
Trials at the end of World War II, and similar U.S. regulations known as
“The Common Rule.”

Rather than defending itself against the serious allegations made by the institute, the EPA instead has said it is essentially above the law and the federal court has no business hearing those serious charges.
The EPA
claims the court has no jurisdiction to hear the case under the Clean
Air Act (CAA): “Nothing in the CAA provides a meaningful standard to
evaluate what air pollution EPA chooses to study or how. To the contrary, the CAA gives EPA broad discretion in the subject matter of its research program. Congress broadly mandated that EPA study the health effects of air pollution.”

Of course, Congress most likely thought the EPA would conduct such research in a lawful manner.
The EPA also says because “no judicially manageable standards are available for judging how and when [EPA] should exercise its discretion in deciding what research to undertake, EPA’s
decision to study the health effects of [particulate matter] using
controlled human exposure studies was a decision committed to the EPA’s
discretion and immune from review under the [Administrative Procedures
Act],” the general law governing the conduct of federal agencies.

The EPA’s view, then, is that because Congress has not enacted a law that expressly forbids the agency
from violating the Nuremberg Code and federal regulations governing
human testing or that expressly guides judges in evaluating the conduct
of agency researchers who experiment on their fellow human beings, the agency has unfettered discretion to do as it pleases with the young, old, sick and anyone else who falls into its clutches.

Will it really take a special act of Congress to compel the EPA to adhere to common standards of humanity? Stay tuned.

Steve
Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of “Green Hell: How
Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop
Them” (Regnery, 2009).

FBI knew of plot to kill OWS activists, remained silent
Only one month into the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations last year,
plans were formulated to identify key figures in the movement and
execute them with a coordinated assault using sniper rifles, new
documents reveal.

In Charles Dickens’
celebrated short story A Christmas Carol (1843), the Malthusian miser
and London stock exchange speculator Ebenezer Scrooge is told by the
ghost of his deceased partner Jacob Marley that “it is required of every
man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men,
and traveled far and wide” for the purpose of doing good works of
charity and thus alleviating human suffering.

In this spirit, let us briefly examine the economic condition of humanity at the close of 2012.

Our finding is sadly that the ongoing world economic depression
continues to increase the needless privations of the vast majority of
the inhabitants of this planet. The great scourges of mankind remain
poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, disease, unemployment, homelessness,
inadequate sanitation, low social mobility, and exclusion -- and many of
these are getting worse.

27,000 children die each day from needless poverty

The tragic condition of humanity is perhaps most dramatically
reflected in the fact that between 22,000 and 27,000 children die each
day due to poverty, largely in the form of starvation, malnutrition, and
diseases like diarrhea which can be cured for a few pennies. The upper
end of this range corresponds to one needless childhood death caused by
poverty every three seconds. Total needless childhood deaths from
poverty, these data suggest, must be approaching at least 10 million per
year - a yearly total which by itself rivals any of the great genocides
of world history. Of the 2.2 billion children who live in today’s
world, one billion live in poverty. This is the estimate from the most
recent United Nations Human Development Report.

And these figures only include children. Estimates for
total daily avoidable mortality, including children, suggest a level of
40,000 to 50,000 fatalities per day -- for a yearly hecatomb of over 18
million deaths.

We need look no further for the severest condemnation of the
existing economic systems of the world, including especially the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank for International
Settlements, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development
Bank, the international system of privatized central banks, and similar
entities.

Three billion people on less than $2.50 per day

These deaths occur in the world in which about a billion people try
to survive on less than one dollar per day. 2.6 billion people or 40%
of the world’s population are struggling to subsist on less than two
dollars a day. It is a world in which a total of 3 billion people or
50% of the world total must try to get along on less than $2.50 per day.
For all the talk of a growing middle class made possible by
globalization, 80% of humanity receives less than $10 per day. At the
other end of the scale, the most prosperous 20% of the world’s
population account for 75% of total world income, and this distribution
becomes even more extreme when permanent assets are considered.

Almost a billion malnourished worldwide

Closely correlated with needless death and needless immiseration is
the problem of world hunger. According to the United Nations Food and
Agricultural Organization in Rome, there are in 2012 some 925 million
persons experiencing hunger and malnutrition. Some 578 million of the
hungry live in the Asian and Pacific countries, followed by 239 million
malnourished in sub-Saharan Africa. Even in the developed countries,
the FAO lists 19 million hungry. We should recall that, in the United
States, some 50 million people rely on food stamps for their survival,
meaning that they may have as little as $1.50 to spend per meal and per
person.

The FAO’s world hunger estimates are very likely too low. This
agency assumes that world hunger was about at its current level in 2008,
and then rose to over one billion people in 2009, before returning to
approximately the 2008 level in 2010. but this may turn out to be
wildly optimistic, and perhaps deliberately so.

Another big factor in economic immiseration is the current high
level of world unemployment. Here the statistics are even sketchier.
The CIA assumes a world unemployment rate of 9.1%. The United Nations
International Labor Organization (ILO) sets this rate at about 6% --
meaning about 200 million current jobless -- but at the same time
concedes that in many developed countries - such as the United States
and the nations of the European Union - the combined figure for
unemployment and underemployment is in the neighborhood of 30%. These
are depression levels by any reckoning.

Especially dramatic is the situation of youth
unemployment. According to the ILO, almost 70 5 million young people
between the ages of 15 and 24 were unemployed, yielding a global youth
unemployment rate of 12.7%, up one full percentage point from
pre-depression levels. Young people are currently three times more
likely to be unemployed than adults. In Greece and Spain, 50% of youth
are jobless.

A federal judge issued a 75-page ruling on Wednesday that declares that the US Justice Department does not have a legal obligation to explain the rationale behind killing Americans with targeted drone strikes.

United States District Court Judge Colleen McMahon wrote in her finding this week that the Obama administration was largely in the right by rejecting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times for materials pertaining to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to execute three US citizens abroad in late 2011 [pdf].

Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both US nationals with alleged ties to al-Qaeda, were killed on September 30 of that year using drone aircraft; days later, al-Awlaki’s teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was executed in the same manner. Although the Obama administration has remained largely quiet about the killings in the year since, a handful of statements made from senior White House officials, including Pres. Barack Obama himself, have provided some but little insight into the Executive Branch’s insistence that the killings were all justified and constitutionally-sound. Attempts from the ACLU and the Times via FOIA requests to find out more have been unfruitful, though, which spawned a federal lawsuit that has only now been decided in court.

Siding with the defendants in what can easily be considered as cloaked in skepticism, Judge McMahon writes that the Obama White House has been correct in refusing the FOIA requests filed by the plaintiffs.

"There are indeed legitimate reasons, historical and legal, to question the legality of killings unilaterally authorized by the Executive that take place otherwise than on a 'hot' field of battle," McMahon writes in her ruling. Because her decision must only weigh whether or not the Obama administration has been right in rejecting the FOIA requests, though, her ruling cannot take into consideration what sort of questions — be it historical, legal, ethical or moral — are raised by the ongoing practice of using remote-controlled drones to kill insurgents and, in these instances, US citizens.

"The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable Catch-22,” she writes. “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reason for their conclusion a secret.”

Throughout her ruling, Judge McMahon cites speeches from both Pres. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder in which the al-Awlaki killings are vaguely discussed, but appear to do little more than excuse the administration’s behavior with their own secretive explanations.

“The Constitution’s guarantee of due process is ironclad, and it is essential — but, as a recent court decision makes clear, it does not require judicial approval before the President may use force abroad against a senior operational leader of a foreign terrorist organization with which the United States is at war — even if that individual happens to be a US citizen,” McMahon quotes Mr. Holder as saying during a March 2012 address at Chicago’s Northwestern University. “Holder did not identify which recent court decisions so held,” the judge replies, “Nor did he explain exactly what process was given to the victims of targeted killings at locations far from ‘hot’ battlefields…”

And while both Mr. Holder and Pres. Obama have discussed the killings in public, including one appearance by the president on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the Justice Department insists that going further by releasing any legal evidence that supports the executions would be detrimental to national security.

While Judge McMahon ends up agreeing with the White House, she does so by making known her own weariness over how the Obama administration has forced the court to rely on their own insistence that information about the attacks simply cannot be discussed.

“As they gathered to draft a Constitution for their newly liberated country, the Founders — fresh from a war of independence from the rule of a King they styled a tyrant — were fearful of concentrating power in the hands of any single person or institution, and most particular in the executive,” McMahon writes.

Responding to the decision on Wednesday, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer issued a statement condemning the White House’s just-won ability to relieve itself from any fair and honest explanation as to the justification of Americans.

“This ruling denies the public access to crucial information about the government’s extrajudicial killing of US citizens and also effectively green-lights its practice of making selective and self-serving disclosures,” Jameel writes. “As the judge acknowledges, the targeted killing program raises profound questions about the appropriate limits on government power in our constitutional democracy. The public has a right to know more about the circumstances in which the government believes it can lawfully kill people, including US citizens, who are far from any battlefield and have never been charged with a crime.”

The ACLU says they plan to appeal Judge McMahon’s decision and are currently awaiting news regarding a separate lawsuit filed alongside the Center for Constitutional Rights that directly challenges the constitutionality of the targeted kills.

“The government has argued that case should also be dismissed,” the ACLU notes.In a Wednesday afternoon statement from the Times, assistant general counsel David McCraw says the paper will appeal the ruling as well.

"We began this litigation because we believed our readers deserved to know more about the US government's legal position on the use of targeted killings against persons having ties to terrorism, including US citizens," McCraw says.

Although she ruled against the plaintiffs, Judge McMahon, says McCraw, explained "eloquently … why in a democracy the government should be addressing those questions openly and fully."

Fatally Flawed: The Pursuit of Justice in a Suspicious Election

Voices of Opposition

Basic Statistics for U.S. Imperialism

New Additions

The World Reacts...

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See Hillary Clinton Make Fun of Gaddafi's Murder

Here is Israel's Crap Treatment of an American Jew

People participate in movements when that particular movement

(1) meets their concrete and tangible needs,(2) offers individuals real experiences in the movement's outcome(3) provides a sense of community,(4) makes available ongoing education and skills training and(5) shows direct and effective ways for people to take further action.

A loose interpretation of a message sent on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 by the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy

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A worker walks out of a factory building outfitted with nets, installed to prevent workers from jumping to their deaths, at a Foxconn factory, in Langfang, Hebei Province August 3, 2010. There have been nearly a dozen suicides at Foxconn plants around China this year alone, prompting calls for investigations into poor working conditions at the plants that make parts for customers such as Apple, HP and Dell. (REUTERS/Jason Lee) #

Portland 9/11 Truth Meetup Group and the Smell of Bacon

You can't have peacefor the sake of peace.Peace is a consequenceof an equitable arrangement.